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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2024

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  • Internal HDMI capture cards are barely supported, there are some professional brands like blackmagic that have support but nearly all consumer grade capture cards are not supported at all, because the companies who make them don’t care about Linux.

    USB based capture cards often work because they use the same standard protocols as USB cameras.


  • Cups is so much better then everything printer related that is available for Windows and it works so good that even Apple was not able or willing to create something on their own and are using it their OS on all devices. Yes, the web interface is dated but nearly every Desktop comes with a modern integrated interface for printer setup and configuration. It is ages that I had to use the web interface. Cups comes with a boatload of printer drivers out of the box. And if not then there are often PPD files on the homepage of the printer manufacturer.

    Multifunction printers are a special case and if they are supported or not depends either on how the device is build (are the parts addressable Independently as printer, scanner, modem/Fax) or is it all a integrated mashup that needs special software or drivers from the manufacturer. In the first case can the printer part often be used with cups and the scanner with sane. Well in the second case there is not much that Linux developers can do without support and goodwill from the manufacturer.





  • You can add your own signing keys to the UEFI and boot an modified bootloader and Kernel that you have signed yourself. So yes, it is possible to “lie”

    For such a locked down system, akin to game consoles or smartphones, would be needed. And even those get jail broken and manipulated, so “total security” on there is not complete but easier to check and ensure. Another way to make sure that the code is not manipulated would be to put all those games into the cloud and have every player only play via streaming. All the code would then run on secured, locked down and verified machines.



  • My first steps were with Debian 2.0 and a Suse Version from about the same time. But that was not very successful so I went back to Windows for about a year and then really got into Linux with Gentoo. I had a year of not much to do, had to wait a year to get into University, and I decided to install the complicated Linux Distribution that I could find.

    Reasoning was: It will break a lot if it is so complicated, due to this I am forced to learn while repairing it.


  • Atomic/immutable distros are just another tool in the tool box. It is great for systems with a limited use scenario like the SteamDeck or HTPCs. I also love to install immutable distributions on systems where the user (often IT-illiterate) and the administrator are different people.

    On my desktop PC I will, for the foreseeable future, use a normal distro (ArchLinux in my case) but i am planing to look into changing my servers to immutable with docker. That could make updates/maintenance easier and reduce the risk for full server compromises






  • Unreal Tournament 2004 depends on SDL 1.3 when I recall correctly, and SDL is neither on Linux nor on any other OS a core system library.

    Binary only programs are foreign to Linux, so yes you will get issues with integrating them. Linux works best when everyone plays by the same rules and for Linux that means sources available.

    Linux in its core is highly modifiable, besides the Kernel (and nowadays maybe systemd), there is no core system that could be used to define a API against. Linux on a Home theater PC has a different system then Linux on a Server then Linux on a gaming PC then Linux on a smartphone.

    You can boot the Kernel and a tiny shell as init and have a valid, but very limited, Linux system.

    Linux has its own set of rules and his own way to do things and trying to force it to be something else can not and will not work.


  • It works under Windows because the windows binaries come with all their dependency .dll (and/or they need some ancient visual runtime installed).

    This is more or less the Flatpack way, with bundling all dependencies into the package

    Just use Linux the Linux way and install your program via the package manager (including Flatpack) and let that handle the dependencies.

    I run Linux for over 25 years now and had maybe a handful cases where the Userland did break and that was because I didn’t followed what I was told during package upgrade.

    The amount of time that I had to get out of .dll-hell on Windows on the other hand. The Linux way is better and way more stable.


  • A new homepage for the business of my wife.

    I plan to use Hugo for it, I just wish the documentation would be better.

    For the homepage I need a few additional “non-blog” pages and from the documentation I am not sure how to do that the best way.

    But to be honest, I have not really looked deeper into that, so it is very possible that I just missed something.





  • My Arch Linux setup on my desktop and my servers are low-maintenance. I do updates on my servers every month or so (unless some security issue was announced, that will be patched right away) and my desktop a few times a week.

    Nearly anything can be low-maintenance with the proper care and consideration.

    For your constraints I would use just use Debian, Alma Linux or Linux Mint and stick with the official packages, flathub and default configuration on the system level. Those are low-maintenance out of the box in general.